Don’t you feel bad for those poor widdle union folks who appear to be well on the way to getting their asses kicked in Wisconsin?

No? Me neither.

Here they are whining about the fact that Democrats and the White House let them down:

…“I’m very disappointed that the DNC has not seen fit to make a dollar investment,” Schaitberger said. “When you’re facing $25 million or more in super-PAC funds, you need money. The campaign needed funds to get up on the air to fight back. … I think that would have been a good investment going into November.” …

When asked about national Democrats’ support in the recall election, another union official scoffed.

“Labor has always been there for the national Democratic Party. The national Democratic Party should be there for labor in this instance. They’re not,” he said.

And now, just like the adolescents they are, they are warning they are going to get their toys and run home to Mommy:

A Democratic strategist working for anti-Walker forces warned that union members would be less enthusiastic about working for Obama if he doesn’t step up for them.

“It won’t go unnoticed by labor the extent to which the White House ultimately decides to fight or not fight for working people the final critical days in Wisconsin,” he said. “The White House needs to move beyond being afraid of its own shadow. The Romney campaign has already been foaming at the mouth to pounce if Walker survives. If that isn’t motivation enough for the White House to start doing everything it can to help defeat Scott Walker, it’s hard to know what is.”

Yeah yeah. We all know the unions will go over the cliff with the Democrats. The rank and file may not like it but the leadership will force them to.

The house of cards will crash. Call it peak government. The game is up.

If we will not impose discipline on ourselves, the market will do it for us.
- Monty

It amazes me that this far in the recession the only solution they have is to increase taxes. It doesn’t seem like any State of the Union or any of the European nations outside of Iceland and Finland have smaller operating budgets today than in 2007. Just tax, tax, tax and spend your way out.

Governments are choosing to do all they can to perpetuate the status quo – focusing on keeping things together just through the next quarter, through the next election cycle. And it’s clear that their best efforts are meeting with less and less as the situation worsens.
- Macleod

Example #1 – the last paragraph says it all:

Malloy’s strategy is flawed because he enacted the largest tax increase in Connecticut history and the state is still facing a deficit.

Example #2 – In January 2011:

Illinois lawmakers raised income tax rates by 46 percent on businesses and a record 67 percent on individuals. And with this flood of new tax dollars, urgent pressure to pass lasting structural spending reforms deflated. The state is still broke. Not only still broke, but they borrowed more money last year further ballooning state debt.

One of the problems for politicians is GDP. GDP in of itself isn’t bad. But insert a bureaucrat statistician and GDP becomes a numbers game.

Take for instance efficiency. Efficient producers such as the manufacturers and suppliers of electronic goods and services, who reduce their prices over time, see their output diminished as a proportion of the statistical whole, while those that maintain their prices by monopolistic or subsidized means keep and even increase their weightings.

Alasdair Macleod continues and spells it out:

if you try and measure an economy by GDP, all you are measuring at the end of the day is the amount of money in the economy. It is not a measure of economic progress and/or true economic growth.

You have money in the private sector where value is produced and competitive advantages are gained – Keynesians are taking money away from the productive economy and injecting it into something less productive or not productive at all.

The money from the productive area of the economy is the area that needs to progress for the world to move forward from this global malaise.

Not only have politicians completely deceived the public over economic growth, but they deceive themselves. For this reason they are unequipped to deal with the developing crises, which are the result of earlier interventions. They now claim that economic growth, the ultimate source of tax revenue and government solvency is jeopardized by spending cuts. Statistically, this is obviously true, because if you take away government costs and support for unwanted economic activities, GDP will fall. But the important point that is commonly missed is that a government which stops draining an economy of its private sector resources actually releases them to be deployed more effectively for the common benefit by those randomly-acting entrepreneurs.
– Alasdair Macleod

The next economic cycle? The Facebook ipo flop – this was as good as any confirmation that we are entering it. And this one is going to be nasty.

IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde told Harvard graduates they faced one of the most challenging economic times since the 1930s…pointing out the inability of 75 million young people to find a decent job.

Barron’s has an article up about the Baltic Dry Index no longer being a relevant metric because of too many ships and not enough trade.

I read China defaulted on coal contracts this month.

Spain, France, and Germany just passed new border controls laws. When the EU collapses, people are going to attempt to flee with their money as this email from a family member in Europe illustrates:

Shortly after I arrived, the merchants did not want dollars or to be paid by credit cards issued from American banks (no Visa, no MasterCard etc) and they covered up the slots to swipe American credit cards on their machines and asked for cash or a bank card with a “chipknip” from a euro bank…The banks are undercapitalized, they are being asked to increase their capital requirements. … When we drove across the German border from Switzerland, there were armed border patrols.

Hattip – Brother Bob, TAB, ZeroHedge, Monty

Hat tip: CJ

This vainglorious administration is so self-absorbed that it refuses to keep secrets if it can in any way benefit politically from them regardless of the cost. Obama is so bent on preening he seems not to have any concern at all for those who actually make the sacrifices. First Joe Biden outs SEAL Team 6 as those who participated in the Bin Laden raid and then Leon Panetta outed the doctor who helped provide intelligence for the raid. That was catastrophic for the doctor.

First he and his wife were fired for engaging in a “fake” vaccination program.

In a notification issued in this regard, the health department said that Afridi’s services were terminated under the Efficiency and Disciplinary (E and D) Rules for being involved in anti-state activities, the Express Tribune reports.

Earlier, 15 lady health workers who were part of the alleged fake vaccination campaign, were were also sacked from their jobs.

It was reported earlier this month that Dr Afridi was dismissed from his post, along with four LHVs.

Earlier, Dr. Shakeel’s wife, Imrana Ghafoor was also removed from her post. She was the principal of the Government Girls Degree College in Darra Adam Khel.

Now he has been jailed for 33 years for treason:

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — A Pakistani surgeon recruited by the CIA to help find Osama bin Laden was on Wednesday sentenced to 33 years in prison for treason, officials said.

Shakil Afridi, who was sacked as a government doctor two months ago, was found guilty under the tribal justice system of Khyber district, part of Pakistan’s semi-autonomous tribal belt.

In addition to his jail sentence, he was fined 320,000 rupees ($3,500). The doctor had worked for years as a surgeon in lawless Khyber, part of the Taliban and al-Qaeda infested tribal belt.

Afridi was not present in the court and not given a chance to defend himself, officials said. Under the tribal system, he would not have had access to a lawyer.

“He has been sentenced for 33 years on treason charges and has been moved to Peshawar central jail after the verdict was announced by the local court,” said Mohammad Siddiq, spokesman for the administrative head of Khyber.

In January, U.S. Defence Secretary Leon Panetta confirmed Afridi had worked for U.S. intelligence by collecting DNA to verify bin Laden’s presence and expressed concern about Pakistan’s treatment of him.

He was arrested shortly after U.S. troops killed the al-Qaeda leader on May 2, 2011 and in October a Pakistani commission recommended that he be tried for treason.

Golly, given this event who wouldn’t want to want to come to the aid of America? The left has not had word of complaint- not about this nor about the unprecedented access to classified material offered to filmmakers in the process of Obama idolatry.

Contrast that to the phony kerfuffle over Valerie Plame and the scorn wrongly heaped upon George Bush.

Yup….you guessed it, they are all racist:

That President Obama lost roughly 40 percent of the vote in Democratic primaries in Arkansas, Kentucky and West Virginia over the last two weeks has drawn massive national headlines.

Those headlines have drawn a collective eyeroll from Democrats — and many others who closely follow national politics — who ascribe the underperformance by the incumbent to a very simple thing: racism.

No, none of these Democrats are willing to put their name to that allegation — either generally or for this story. But, it is, without question the prevalent viewpoint they hold privately.

…Former Texas Rep. Charlie Stenholm, a longtime conservative Democrat, acknowledged that “race is definitely a factor for some Texans but not the majority,” adding: “The most significant factor is the perception/reality that the Obama administration has leaned toward the ultra-left viewpoint on almost all issues.”

Oh, so race is a factor for “some” but he has also leaned ultra-left. That couldn’t be the reason could it?

According to the WaPo, it’s not because these states are mostly conservative (including the Democrats in those states) and they don’t like ultra-left candidates. No, it’s just racism.

Tom Cole, a Republican House Member, dismissed the idea of race as a major factor in opposition to Obama out of hand.

Said Cole:

“Obama fares poorly in states like Oklahoma, Kentucky and Arkansas because he has nothing in common with them. They are rural, he is urban. They are populist, he is elitist. And in case anyone hadn’t noticed, they are conservative while he is liberal. That isn’t just true of Republicans in these states. It is true of Democrats as well.”

Get outta here. We all know it’s because they are all a bunch of redneck racist hillbilly’s.

Sigh….

Surprise Is A Near Sighted Porcupine Falling In Love With A Cactus
Cowboy Proverb

I remember hearing my creative writing instructor say, we should write about things we are familiar with and understand. I repeat this advice to myself at least once a week; my old writing instructor’s words have served well as a guide, but they have never been humorous until today.

When You Got Nothin To Lose, Try Anything
Cowboy Proverb

Robin Abcarian was probably excited about the prospect of covering the horsey story of Ann Romney, while trying to gain political traction for the failed presidency of Barack Obama; however, writing an article on a minnow in the shark tank and trying to expose the secrets of life in the shark world is laughable.

Apparently, Ann Romney sold a horse and the horse turned up lame at a later date. Does Robin know how many advanced Dressage Horses turn up lame at some point. I’ll let you in on a little secret, Robin, nearly all of them. Lameness finishes up all the careers of dressage, jumpers, hunters, and three day event horses; it is not a question of “will” or “if”, it is a question of “when”.

It was the end of a long day in a stuffy Simi Valley office building. Ann Romney had been under oath for more than four hours, testifying in a sometimes contentious deposition about a pricey horse she sold that may or may not have been afflicted with a condition that made him unrideable.

In the airless room, Romney was getting annoyed.

“That really is — that really is irritating,” she said when the opposing attorney implied she didn’t know who looked after her horse in Moorpark when she was at her home in Boston. “Of course I know who was looking after my horse. You’re just trying to irritate me.”

Stupidity and overwork on the part of a rider or trainer can lead to premature lameness, but if a horse continues to advance and compete, they will eventually become lame. (Ask any human athlete at the upper levels if he has lameness) There are a few “iron horses” that never display lameness, but they are approximately one in a thousand.

Is Dressage an Elitist Sport? It can be, especially, if you ride in Sullivan Canyon, Beverly Hills, Malibu, Calabasas, Thousand Oaks, Hidden Valley, and Moorpark; however, there are low scale operations in those areas, where the riding is comparatively inexpensive. Although, I must report, some of the Liberals’ biggest and wealthiest donors and fat cats are horse owners who live in these areas and their horse stories of indulgence would make delightful reading material for many Americans. I am sure they would gain far more traction than Ann Romney’s deposition over a horse deal that went south. (Not an uncommon event by the way, but when someone feels like a fool in California, someone else should pay.)

When we speak of spending excessive amounts of money on equine indulgences, comparing the Libs in Sullivan Canyon and Malibu, to Ann Romney in Moorpark, would be like running a race between a freight train and a fat man. The LA Times might call some of the Lib Fat Cats with horses and ask if they mind having their horse indulgences opened up to the internet. Ask if they want the public to know of luxury bathrooms in barns that cost more than most homes in California or if they want to hear of wood from Africa and South America being used to build stalls for their horses. Luxury digs for horses within twenty or thirty miles of people living in the drug infested squalor of the ghettos of LA. The same ghetto dwellers for whom they pretend to care for so self-righteously.

Do Not Tamper With The Natural Ignorance Of A Greenhorn
Cowboy Proverb

Ann Romney says she loves her horses and I believe her; although, I have never worked for her and I don’t know her, but I recognize her compassion for animals, for people like her, people with genuine or real compassion for horses, generally have the same compassion for humans.

Many horse owners have no compassion for horses when they can no longer perform, they become more like inanimate objects; to be frank, they become disposable, they become devoid of value when they no longer allow the limelight to shine upon the rider. They are discarded with extreme indifference, for they have served their purpose. This is the real story, a story of cold callous cruelty, especially, among those who wear false compassion on their sleeve.

“It’s like children,” Romney, a mother of five, testified about Super Hit, the horse at the center of the lawsuit. “You don’t … say one is better than the other, but I loved him.”

Ann Romney spends her own money on her horses, she feels they are therapeutic and for those of you who have read my articles on horses, you probably know, I agree with her.

Romney, who rode horses as a girl, began riding seriously as an adult after being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1998. “I was losing most of the function of my right side,” she testified at her deposition on June 3, 2010. “And I decided I needed to go back and do what I loved before I couldn’t do it anymore.”

She soon fell in love with dressage, a fussy Olympic sport that is also called “horse ballet.” In dressage, a horse moves in delicate, dance-like steps to music as the rider, formally clad in top hat and tails, imperceptibly guides the animal.

Because it requires tremendous muscle control, dressage also provided Romney unexpected therapeutic benefits.

“Riding exhilarated me; it gave me a joy and a purpose,” Romney told the Chronicle of the Horse magazine in 2008. “When I was so fatigued that I couldn’t move, the excitement of going to the barn and getting my foot in the stirrup would make me crawl out of bed.”

So now, we know why Romney is not suited for the presidency. His wife sold a horse that became lame and during a deposition she became annoyed with a lawyer or maybe it is because she has a healthy hobby, a hobby she pays for with her own money, instead of flying around on vacations at taxpayer’s expense with an entourage. Oh excuse me, Michelle’s vacations are to promote good will around the world and show poor people how the Obamas can spend money on indulgences like separate jets to vacation hot spots, now there is an indulgence.

I would rather write about more significant political ideas, but if the LA Times wants to continue trying to smear Ann Romney over senseless and inane horse trivia, they might be surprised at the some of the secrets of the elite equestrian world.

Have you ever seen one of those movies where a car is speeding towards a cliff and just before it heads over the edge the driver jumps out and the car flies into the abyss and maybe crashes and ignites into a ball of flame?

If you haven’t don’t worry, you’re about to live one… and unfortunately for you, you’re not the driver who escapes, you’re a passenger strapped in for the excitement. President Obama is the driver and the way he’s running his campaign, it looks like he’s getting ready to jump…

As you probably guessed, the car in this story is the United States economy. Everyone knows that the economy is… anemic to say the least. The unemployment rate, which is now down to 8.1% is so only because 2.2 million people have given up looking for work since Obama’s inauguration. If those people were still looking for work, if they had any expectation of actually finding a job, the unemployment rate would be 11%.

As bad as two million people being so discouraged that they quit looking for work altogether is, there are a pair of dangers right around the corner that may mushroom that number, and take millions of jobs with them.

The first has to do with taxes. Unless it’s fixed, in January 2013 the tax code is going to create what the Washington Post has christened Taxmageddon. Between the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, the beginning of the taxes within ObamaCare, and a variety of other tax changes, federal taxes are going to increase by a total of $500 billion next year. That means that the government is going to be sucking $500 billion out of the private sector, i.e. your pocket, to fund its turtle tunnels, green energy boondoggles and Las Vegas conventions. To put that amount in perspective, that $500 billion you will no longer have to spend is more than the revenues of Apple, Target, Coke, Disney, McDonalds and Procter & Gamble combined! Now imagine removing that much activity out of the economy… That shouldn’t have much of an impact on jobs.

Would you rather keep that $1,600 (per person) tax hike and spend it as you like on goods and services that benefit you and your family, or would you rather send it to Washington so that the borg can spend it on things like National Public Radio, wealth redistribution schemes and Amtrak? Unfortunately for us we already know what Barack Obama thinks about that.

The second bomb the country is facing is particularly troubling because the danger is so obvious. Why is it obvious? Because we’re still licking our wounds from a mini version of the same problem: the housing crisis driven recession. Although the fundamental cause of the economic meltdown was government intervention in the housing market, the proximate cause was the sub-prime mortgages. Many of those mortgages were of the variable rate type where borrowers received a low introductory rate that would adjust (usually upward) over a period of time or in some cases, abruptly. When rates were low everything was peachy and consumers were purchasing houses at record numbers while investors were borrowing to buy investment properties. The markets were humming along.

Then everything hit a wall. Interest rates jumped, borrowers were no longer able to pay their mortgages, property values plummeted, banks collapsed, and the economy staggered into the “Great Recession”. We were told we were on the brink of a financial meltdown on par with the financial collapse of 1929 and civilization might not survive. Five years later we are limping along, but at least the world didn’t end.

Unfortunately for you and me, Barack Obama has not been smart enough to learn from that recent history. Over the last three years he has piled a total of $5 trillion in new debt on the shoulders of the American people. As bad as that is, that’s not the worst part of it! The greater danger is that virtually every dollar of that new debt is in the form of short term notes. The administration chose this route because, like the homebuyers, they get a great low rate. A two year note today carries a .03% interest rate while a ten year would carry a 2% rate. The problem is, when interest rates spike, all that debt will have to be refinanced, likely at the much higher rates. As an example of the impact of higher rates, consider this: If the government were today paying the 5% it was paying a mere 5 years ago the interest payments alone would be an additional $400 billion a year, almost as much as they will spend on the whole of Medicare this year. That would be like removing from the economy the revenue of Ford, Dow Chemical, Kellogg’s, Google, GAP, the NFL and Microsoft as well. A rate jump from .03% to 5%? No way, that’s not possible. Really? In the two years between January 1978 and January 1980 interest rates jumped a total of 14%, from 6% to 20%. Imagine what $10 trillion financed at 20% might look like!

Barack Obama has set the United States on a Thelma and Louise course, but likely won’t be in the driver’s seat when we actually leave terra firma. Unfortunately for Mitt Romney, the pain that Obama has guaranteed us will likely occur on his watch and there may not be much he can do to avoid it. Indeed, unbelievably, it has the potential to make the current disaster of a presidency look relatively prosperous in comparison.

If he recognizes this in advance, Romney will have the opportunity to steel the American people for the maelstrom ahead while giving them a reason to expect things will get better. That is after all what real leaders do: They prepare their countrymen to persevere through difficult times without needing a scapegoat to make their case; they inspire their citizens to pick themselves up, dust themselves off and go forward to build the prosperous future they seek; and finally, and perhaps most importantly, they seek to reduce the state’s power to frustrate and obstruct the citizenry’s ability to build that prosperous future. Now that’s an action movie I’d like to see.

The Orlando Sentinel has apparently answered the question of whose voice was heard screaming for help in the Trayvon Martin shooting.

In a timeline included in evidence documents released last week, Sanford police spelled out down to the second, what happened the night George Zimmerman fatally shot Trayvon Martin, based on time-stamped calls to their dispatch center.

It shows Zimmerman fired 1 minute, 57 seconds after he hung up.

*1911:12 – Call received from George Zimmerman reporting suspicious person

1913:19 – Zimmerman relays that suspicious person is running from him.

1913:36 – Dispatcher asks Zimmerman if he is following suspicious person

1913:36 – Dispatcher advises Zimmerman “Okay; we don’t need you to do that”

1915:23 – Approximate time call with Zimmerman ends

1916:43 – 911 call placed by (blacked out name) where Zimmerman is heard screaming for help

1917:20 – Shot fired; screams from Zimmerman cease

1917:40 – Officer T. Smith arrives on scene

1919:43 – Officer T. Smith locates and places Zimmerman in custody.

via Patterico

No other version ever made any sense. It’s now abundantly clear that the Angela Corey persecution prosecution is political and nothing more.

To all of the leftists out there, it is time for you to take a dose of reality when it comes to tax policy in this country. I’m not just picking on you this time – I’m throwing out a comparable reality check to my libertarian/conservative brethren. For you, it’s time to put to rest one of your favorite solutions to fiscal problems at every level of government – I am of course, referring to raising taxes.

I’ve written before about how targeted luxury goods such as yachts and jewelry have failed. I’ve also illustrated that you can raise taxes all that you like; it will not make a difference unless we curb government spending. Today I’m going to show you that no matter how much you raise taxes on the wealthy, they will never pay the percentage that you personally are morally and intellectually qualified to deem as fair. How do I know this? Because they can do it today and choose not to.

Before we go into the choices of wealthy leftists, it’s important to first note the difference between tax rates and tax revenue. The tax rate is the percentage that the government takes of income or goods, such as in a sales tax or import tariff. Think of the 25% tax rate or a 6% sales tax as illustrations. Tax revenue is the dollars that are actually collected. You can raise rates as high as you want to. As those higher rates make their affected activity more expensive, we see less of it, aka. tax avoidance. This is not the same as tax evasion, which is avoiding taxes that you are legally bound to pay under law. Tax avoidance is using legal means to avoid a tax rate. On an investment level think of investing in tax free government bonds. At the local level think of living close to the border of a state with a low sales tax rate (such as Delaware’s 0% sales tax) and traveling to that state to do the bulk of your shopping. Both of these activities are legal ways to avoid taxes. Or you could simply not purchase a good, as the luxury tax example referenced above shows. At the level of taxing the wealthy or taxing businesses, they will use every resource at their disposal to avoid paying any more taxes than they have to. If our government makes paying the tax less expensive than avoiding the tax, people will choose to pay the tax.

Look at the table below. It shows the income of someone who has an annual income of $1 million per year. In the name of fairness we impose a 50% tax on that millionaire’s income. Having worked hard for his money said millionaire will look for ways to avoid having to hand over half of his income, and hires accountants and lawyers to help him avoid this tax. By paying them $100 thousand per year they get him down to a 20% rate, he gets a total tax + accounting cost of $300,000. Guess which one he chooses? Now look below the black stripe – when the rate is lowered to 25% it costs the person less to pay the tax than to avoid it. As an added bonus, the government actually collects more money at the lower rate, hence we see actual "revenue enhancement."

Now back to the choices made by the wealthy. We have our share of leftist billionaires who say the correct things about tax fairness to the powers that be. Buffett, Gates, Ted Turner, etc. If they feel so strongly about people at their income levels, why don’t they simply pay it? Why do they set up charitable foundations to selfishly help causes that they personally support when by their own words that money can be better spent by a mid-level bureaucrat? Why is every wealthy billionaire not cheerfully walking down to the treasury department and handing over an annual endowment to support the government’s good deeds? Because they choose not to. I think that we can all agree that Warren Buffet is an intelligent guy. When he negotiated his compensation package he was well aware of the tax implications of taking home his pay via capital gains versus salary. He could just as easily have negotiated salary with performance bonuses tied to stock price that would have been taxed at a higher rate. Why didn’t Buffett do this? The answer is simple – he chose not to.

I apologize if this seems pretty elementary, but what is it that makes you believe that raising the rates on these individuals will cause them to pay the amount that you want to collect? Yes we can close tax loopholes, but Warren Buffett and Bill Gates can afford to hire the tax accountants and lawyers to ensure that that rate never gets applied to their income. You know who can’t afford those lawyers and accountants? It’s the small to mid-sized business owners who spend their time and money on such evil pursuits such as providing goods and services that customers willingly purchase and creating jobs. You can scream for fairness all you want, but raising tax rates is not going to accomplish that.

Of course, I have evidence to back this up. Look no farther than that bluest of the blue states, Massachusetts. The good people of that state spent decades choosing to inflict leftist stalwarts John Kerry and Ted Kennedy onto the American people. Kerry and Kennedy were always reliable leaders of all things leftist, so you would expect them to be at the front of the line when it comes to paying their fair share of taxes, right? Wrong. A few years ago John Forbes Kerry, a man who earned his wealth the old fashioned way by marrying it, cause a bit of a stir over his yacht. Apparently the state of Massachusetts levies and extra $50,000 tax for anchoring your boat along its shoreline, so he chose to anchor his yacht over in Rhode Island to avoid paying his state’s tax. I guess that now we can question his patriotism.

Then there was Ted – the late Lion of the Senate who is so near and dear to so many on the left. He would be the first in line to ensure that he’s paying his fair share, right? Wrong. When his mother Rose was close to death, Ted realized that the state was going to try to take its fair share of her vast estate, so rather than allow this money go toward helping the poor or keeping teachers and firefighters employed the Lion of the Senate did what any compassionate leftist would do – he had his mother declare residency in the state of Florida, which does not have the same tax laws. So instead of this money going to the poor or our brave civil servants, the money stayed a cause that Mr. Kennedy deemed far more worthy – Mr. Kennedy.

I won’t follow the classic leftist tactic of pretending that two isolated incidents equate research. The two gentlemen I just cited make for a good starting point, let’s spread this example across a macro level, as in the entire state of Massachusetts. It’s citizens found a perfect way to get the rich to pay their fair share – they’ve passed an optional higher rate on their state taxes. That’s right, if you are one of the wealthier taxpayers you are allowed to choose to pay that higher state tax. Guess how many do – if you said "somewhere around nobody" you would be correct.

You know who else did not pay this optional higher tax rate? That’s right, the Occupy Wall Street favorite Native American candidate in Elizabeth Warren – wealthy one percenter, advocate of the downtrodden, and pure hypocrite.

It also doesn’t take much research to find other examples of where "Revenue enhancements" actually… didn’t.

This is my point. I’ve taken the bluest of the blue states, and two of the truest blues that any good leftist could ask for as representatives in Congress. By your criteria of ideology, these represent the best of the best from your end of the spectrum, and if they can’t be counted on to pay their fair share, what hope is there that the government will be able to collect from those evil, selfish, knuckle dragging red staters?

I’m not suggesting that we abolish taxes or government – I’ve written about this before, and save for your occasional flake nobody else is either. If we want more revenue coming in, we need to simplify our tax code and stop promoting policies that are designed to restrict taxable activities. And conservatives have their own issues with getting in touch with reality on taxes, but from your end you need to take a hard look at your policies. One point you can rightly ding me for is asking what that ideal rate should be. To be honest, I don’t have a magic number, and where we should be on the Laffer Curve is a separate debate. But we’ve established that we have reached the point where your stock answer of "more" as to what the ideal tax rate should be won’t work, either. We need a less complicated tax code, and your endless mantra of raising taxes as the answer… isn’t.

Conservatives, I have a bone to pick with my brethren. It’s over a favorite piece of red meat that politicians like to throw at us, one that we enthusiastically support, and one that will never happen. I am of course, referring to the flat tax. First off, let me be up front about my own views – I favor a flat tax. More specifically, I favor simplifying our tax code. As I’ve pointed out to our leftist friends in this post’s companion piece, tax rates are irrelevant – amounts collected are all that matters. Simplifying our tax code and making it cheaper to pay taxes will naturally result in more companies and individuals choosing to simply pay the tax rather than pay to avoid said taxes. A flat tax would be ideal – and it is never going to happen.

Before getting into the subject, let’s step back and look at a great example of how a drastic change to the law of the land gets passed. I am of course, referring to Obamacare. While conservatives were very well united in their opposition, the left were pretty much united as well in their efforts to allow all Americans to enjoy higher premiums, doctor shortages, and rationing of health care. Their main bone to pick with the law is that it does not go far enough to kill off the private health insurance as quickly as they would have liked, but at the end of the day, to quote the most eloquent voice of the left, it was their "Big F***ing Deal".

Now look at the proposals for a flat tax. Many conservatives will agree that a simple across the board tax rate of something like 20% for all Americans (a number I am arbitrarily throwing out) would be fair. Yes, the family making $50,000 per year is paying the same rate as the guy making $10 million, but at the end of the day the family is paying $20,000 in taxes while the millionaire is paying $2 million. How’s that for fair? Just as conservatives were pretty well united against Obamacare, the left will be against anything that tries to simplify the tax code that might lead to people actually giving up the same percentage of their income. Take away abortion funding, green energy subsidy sinkholes, or cut off funding to various members of the NGO-Nonprofit industrial complex (the only place of employment for many leftists without any useful skills) and there is no way anyone on the left can get behind a fair tax.

Wait a minute, that’s the same problem with conservatives. No, not the same causes – the same principle. Don’t believe me? we’ve already seen it. Early on in his administration President Obama proposed reducing the charitable deduction tax credit, suggesting that the government instead use that money toward helping to fund charities of its choosing (faith based initiatives, anyone?). Study after study has shown that conservatives give more of their time and money to charity than leftists do. And this makes sense. While I believe that leftists care about helping others as much as conservatives do the approaches sum up the two sides’ philosophies – "I am responsible" versus "Someone else should be responsible". Naturally conservatives were none too happy about this potential change to how charities were to be treated.

For most individuals this would not affect their giving too much. Many people give to causes of charities because they want to support them, not for personal financial reasons. Most of the charitable giving patterns for Sister Babe and me won’t be altered if this change were to go into effect. But we’re not the ones that charities are worried about. They are more worried about the larger donations that they get from wealthy individuals and corporations that make up a larger percentage of their operating budgets. As almost anyone can tell you when something gets more expensive you will see less of it. Philanthropists and companies will naturally look at what their best financial strategies are, and if the now more expensive charitable giving is not the best option it won’t happen. No, large charitable donations won’t disappear, but they will decrease. Being that we conservatives are more closely tied to charities in general we’re going to stand up for them, whether by maintaining the tax loopholes if not asking for direct government subsidy.

How about if we hit a little bit closer to home, literally? Conservatives don’t like the idea of doing away with the mortgage interest tax deduction, either. And lest you think that I’m only running an exercise in finger pointing, you can count me into this category. When Sister Babe and I bought our house last year I went through our finances in depth and laid out a few scenarios for what we could afford and how much we wanted to spend and lay down as a down payment. The interest tax deduction was one of the factors that went into the grand equation, and if this deduction were to go away it would hurt us, too. Granted, if someone can make the case for how an overall simplification would either be helpful or moderately painful at best, I’ll be the first in line to support it. But I’m not ready to sacrifice our budget if others are getting to keep their loopholes.

These are only two examples, and ones that are easy to illustrate. For every deduction in our tax code there is a special interest that will fight tooth and nail to preserve it. Sadly, politicians don’t have the will to stand up since it’s a lot easier to show how someone will be directly hurt by a closed loophole than it is to show how we as a society would benefit by simplifying the code. Still don’t believe me? How many presidential candidates walk through Iowa and talk about ending corn subsidies?

And that’s the reality we face. As conservatives we’re supposed to be the adults in the room, the ones who not only are willing to acknowledge that we have a problem, but understand that we have to actually take action to get off of our current path to destruction. If we can’t rely on the conservative base to rally around this cause, what hope is there of rallying enough independents to defeat the lefties on this?

Are you listening, Herman Cain? You’re exactly the kind of guy who can articulate a realistic tax reform approach to economically illiterate journalists and reach the American people. 9-9-9 sounds good in theory, but in reality it has no chance of happening. And this is coming from someone who was one of Herman’s Cainaanites back when he was in the race. While I didn’t think that 9-9-9 should have been his answer to most of the questions posed to him, I am grateful for the fact that he got the GOP primary debate questions pointed toward a subject as critical as our tax code as opposed to "boxers or briefs?" pabulum. The flat tax can be useful as an extreme position for bargaining from, just as the left used the single payer health care system during that debate. Obama was able to pretend he was a moderate by passing a law that would only gently strangle private health insurance to death rather than the immediate decapitation his base wanted.

All hope isn’t lost, though. Our tax code is going to have to be simplified in the next decade or two because it has to. We’ll either do it because we have the maturity to make painful decisions or because painful consequences will force us to. Who knows? Maybe watching what happens to Europe might even wake our leftist friends up! I’m not counting on it, but if we’re going to wake them up we have to ensure that our objectives are grounded in reality.